Now available

We are excited to announce the general availability of Azure premium files for customers optimizing their cloud-based file shares on Azure. Premium files offers a higher level of performance built on solid-state drives (SSD) for fully managed file services in Azure.

Premium tier is optimized to deliver consistent performance for IO-intensive workloads that require high-throughput and low latency. Premium file shares store data on the latest SSDs, making them suitable for a wide variety of workloads like databases, persistent volumes for containers, home directories, content and collaboration repositories, media and analytics, high variable and batch workloads, and enterprise applications that are performance sensitive. Our existing standard tier continues to provide reliable performance at a low cost for workloads less sensitive to performance variability, and is well-suited for general purpose file storage, development/test, backups, and applications that do not require low latency.

Data is rarely simple. Not every piece of data we have can fit nicely into a single Excel worksheet of rows and columns. Data has many diverse relationships, such as the multiple locations and phone numbers for a single customer .or multiple authors and genres of a single book. Of course, relationships typically are even more complex than this, and as we start to leverage AI to understand our data the additional learnings we get only add to the complexity of relationships. For that reason, expecting customers to have to flatten the data so it can be searched and explored is often unrealistic. We heard this often and it quickly became our number one most requested Azure Search feature. Because of this we were excited to announce the general availability of complex types support in Azure Search. In this post, we explain what complex types adds to Azure Search and the kinds of things you can build using this capability.

The release of Microsoft Azure Blockchain Workbench 1.7.0, which along with our new Azure Blockchain Service, can further enhance your blockchain development and projects. You can deploy a new instance of Blockchain Workbench through the Azure portal or upgrade your existing deployments to 1.7.0 using the upgrade script. This update includes the improvements such as integration with Azure Blockchain Service, and enhance compatibility with Quorum.

Announcing our second Azure Blueprint for an important compliance standard with the release of the PCI-DSS v3.2.1 blueprint. The new blueprint maps a core set of policies for Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) compliance to any Azure deployed architecture, allowing businesses such as retailers to quickly create new environments with compliance built in to the Azure infrastructure. Azure Blueprints is a free service that enables customers to define a repeatable set of Azure resources that implement and adhere to standards, patterns, and requirements. Azure Blueprints allow customers to set up governed Azure environments that can scale to support production implementations for large-scale migrations.

Now in preview

Announcing that Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 integration with Azure Event Grid is in preview. This means that Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 can now generate events that can be consumed by Event Grid and routed to subscribers with webhooks, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Functions, and Logic Apps as endpoints. With this capability, individual changes to files and directories in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 can automatically be captured and made available to data engineers for creating rich big data analytics platforms that use event-driven architectures.

Technical content

Azure Machine Learning service is a cloud service that you use to train, deploy, automate, and manage machine learning models, all at the broad scale that the cloud provides. The service fully supports open-source technologies such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, and scikit-learn and can be used for any kind of machine learning, from classical ml to deep learning, supervised and unsupervised learning. In this article you will learn to deploy your machine learning models with Azure Machine Learning.

End of support for Windows Server 2008 R2 has been slated by Microsoft for January 14th 2020. Said announcement increased interest in a previous post detailing steps on Active Directory Certificate Service migration from server versions older than 2008 R2. Many subscribers of ITOpsTalk.com have reached out asking for an update of the steps to reflect Active Directory Certificate Service migration from 2008 R2 to 2016 / 2019 and of course our team is happy to oblige.

Now that we’re starting to build our IoT application it’s time to start talking about the local development experience for the application. At the end of the day I use IoT Edge to do the deployment onto the device and manage the communication with IoT Hub and there is a very comprehensive development guide for Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio 2019. The workflow of this is to create a new IoT Edge project, setup IoT Edge on your machine and do deployments to it that way. This is the way I’d recommend going about it yourself as it gives you the best replication of production and local development.

Azure shows

Windows Container support is available in preview in Azure App Service. By deploying applications via Windows Containers in Azure App Service you can install your dependencies inside the container, call APIs currently blocked by the Azure App Service sandbox and use the power of containers to migrate applications for which you no longer have the source code. All of this and you still get to use the awesome feature set enabled by Azure App Service such as auto-scale, deployment slots and increased developer productivity.

Erica Joy joins Ashley McNamara to share her not-so-secret personal mission: making genealogy information open, queryable, and easily parsable. She shares a bit about why this is so critical, common challenges, and tips for re-building your own family tree – or using open data to uncover whatever the information you need for your personal mission.

There is significant effort happening to add support for running desktop applications on .NET Core 3.0. In this episode, Jeremy interviews Mike Harsh about some of the work being done and decisions being made to enable Windows Forms and WPF applications to run well on .NET Core 3.0 and beyond.

Where do RxJS, Reactive Programming and the Redux pattern fit into your developer workflow? Where can you learn form the community leaders? Does wearing a hoodie make you a better developer? Oh and remember, go to RxJS Live and drinks are on Aaron!

Sujit, Kendall, and Cynthia talk with the one and only Richard Campbell on how to tell the cloud story, the conversations to have with customers as they enter the cloud and the implications of globally distributed cloud that needs to be considered. Probably one of our favorite shows.

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Industries and partners

As the U.S. healthcare system continues to transition away from paper to more a digitized ecosystem, the ability to link an individual’s medical data together correctly becomes increasingly challenging. Patients move, marry, divorce, change names and visit multiple providers throughout their lifetime, with each visit creating new records, and the potential for inconsistent or duplicate information grows. Duplicate medical records often occur as a result of multiple name variations, data entry errors, and lack of interoperability—or communication—between systems. Poor patient identification and duplicate records in turn lead to diagnosis errors, redundant medical tests, skewed reporting and analytics, and billing inaccuracies. The Azure platform offers a wealth of services for partners to enhance, extend, and build industry solutions. Here we will describe how one Microsoft partner, Nextgate, uses Azure to solve a unique problem.

Legacy systems can be a nightmare for any business to maintain. In the insurance industry, carriers struggle not only to maintain these systems but to modify and extend them to support new business initiatives. The insurance business is complex, every state and nation has its own unique set of rules, regulations, and demographics. Creating new products such as an automobile policy has traditionally required the coordination of many different processes, systems, and people. These monolithic systems traditionally used to create new products are inflexible and creating a new product can be an expensive proposition. The Azure platform offers a wealth of services for partners to enhance, extend, and build industry solutions. Here we describe how one Microsoft partner, Sunlight Solutions, uses Azure to solve a unique problem.

CitiusTech is a specialist provider of healthcare technology services which helps its customers to accelerate innovation in healthcare. CitiusTech used Azure Cosmos DB to simplify the real-time collection and movement of healthcare data from variety of sources in a secured manner. With the proliferation of patient information from established and current sources, accompanied with scrupulous regulations, healthcare systems today are gradually shifting towards near real-time data integration.